My precious torso!

by David Willis on July 25, 2012 at 10:54 pm
Posted In: Blog

Phew!  I’m finally to Part Five of Bruticus.  Unlike the other four, Onslaught doesn’t become any number of limbs.  He’s limited to being the torso/head/thighs.  Someone’s gotta have all the male connection ports!

I am a little saddened by Onslaught, but not because of Onslaught himself.  No, I’m sad in advance for Impactor.  I’ve always wanted an Impactor toy.  (Well, where “always” means “since about 1997,” when I learned the Marvel UK stuff existed.)  But Onslaught’s robot mode has some problems, and I want Impactor to be amaaaaaazing.  And if Onslaught’s not amazing, then neither will Impactor.

Technically, Onslaught only has two problems.  His forearms.  They are attached to his elbows by tiiiny ball joints.  But his elbows are attached to his biceps by some very stiff ratcheting rotational joints.  I think you know where this is leading.  You try to move his forearms, his forearms are more likely to pop off than to move, because that’s the path of least resistance.  It’s supremely annoying.

Maybe the plastic tolerances on Impactor will be different, and his arms will be fine!  Who knows.  But it irks me.

The arms are what get in the way of the other modes, too.  They just sorta hang underneath his ribcage in torso mode (though they peg in place) and in truck mode you have to cover them up with his weapon or else he’s a truck with arms on his hood.

The rest of Onslaught’s robot mode has no problems.  Sure, he obviously has Bruticus’ pelvis hanging off the back of his ass even when seen from the front, but I can overlook that.  And don’t look at him from the back because of the whole Bruticus head thing, but Transformers rarely look nice from that angle anyway.   (I do wish you could plug in his gun behind his head, as you could the original Onslaught.  You can in Bruticus mode, as is intended, but the Bruticus head gets in the way of it happening when Onslaught is in robot mode.)

His truck mode is not great.  Well… it’s better than it looks, and how it looks is “less good 1986 Kup pickup truck mode.”   Again, I care less about this re: Onslaught, and moreso about future Impactor, who hasn’t had a toy before.  It’s definitely its own thing and not a recreation of 1985 Onslaught’s very long military truck mode.  Like Brawl, Onslaught was a pre-existing design for the previous Transformers game, so the designers didn’t have as much leeway, and instead the torso mode had to be kind of shoehorned out of him.  If you’ve seen his truck mode from War for Cybertron, you’ll see that it suffers the most.

The torso mode though is everything Bruticus needs, however.  It’s the most important thing Onslaught does.  He’s the torso, which means he has to hold everything together.  He can’t be the weak link, and he’s not.  He pegs together very stiffly so that the whole thing doesn’t fall apart under its own weight.  This is a good reason for him to be a Deluxe instead of a Voyager or larger — if he were any bigger, this thing would be hella unstable.

FOC Onslaught is not a great toy of the Onslaught character.  But he’s a fantastic Bruticus torso.  Given a choice between the two, I think this toy chose wisely.

At least Impactor will be orange.  Orange absolves a lot of sins.


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